In recent years, industrial personal computers have become increasingly prevalent in many industries. It is not uncommon today to see installations with rows of industrial PCs arranged in racks. While many of these industrial PCs are often designed and manufactured to higher standards than consumer PCs, they still are occasionally in need of repair, and downtime can be expensive and problematic for many industrial PC users. Consequently, users of industrial PCs will often desire to monitor the interior and exterior environments of such PCs, as well as other operational parameters. Monitoring the PCs can help to predict, postpone and eliminate some industrial PC failures. Remote environmental monitoring has been successfully performed with prior art monitors. Additionally, some of these prior art environmental monitors have even been enhanced to permit remote reconfiguration of the parameters of the monitor or management appliance.
Some prior art management appliances have performed the function of generating and issuing alarms when certain parameters in the monitored PC exceed predetermined limits. In such cases, such monitors may generate and dispatch an e-mail, using SMTP, to notify of the event.
While these management appliances or monitors have been used extensively in the past, they do have some drawbacks. First of all, when numerous PCs are being simultaneously remotely monitored, it can become difficult to manage a simple parameter reconfiguration. Typically, these prior art monitors will require that each monitor be independently accessed either on site or via a computer network, and the parameters are then reset. Depending on the number of monitors to be reset, the task can be rather time consuming. With respect to the monitors which issue e-mails as a notification, they do not address how a management appliance might receive information.
Consequently, there exists a need for improved methods and systems for reconfiguring groups of management appliances with common reconfiguration parameters.